Glenn Thrush, White House correspondent for The New York Times, in Washington, D.C. in September.

By Stephen Voss/Redux.

Ever since early October, when The New York Times took down Harvey Weinstein with a culture-shattering exposé that laid bare the movie mogul’s decades’ worth of predatory behavior toward women, the news organization has kept a running tally of influential men who have either resigned or been fired from their jobs as a result of accusations related to varying degrees of sexual misconduct. One person who has not yet appeared on that list, which included 42 names at the time of this writing, is one of the Times’s own White House correspondents, Glenn Thrush, whose name instead appears on a list of 24 people facing “suspensions and other fallout.”

Thrush, after all, was suspended on November 20 after Vox published an article that revealed several instances of “unwanted groping and kissing,” “wet kisses out of nowhere,” and “hazy sexual encounters that played out under the influence of alcohol,” as they were described in a half reported, half first-person account by the site’s editorial director, Laura McGann. In a notable twist, McGann wrote that she was the recipient of a bar-booth come-on from Thrush while the two of them were colleagues at Politico. Thrush, who is married with children and, at 50, much older than the young female journalists with whom the alleged encounters took place, apologized and said he was seeking outpatient treatment for an alcohol problem. The Times subsequently began an investigation into Thrush’s behavior, and the specific episodes outlined in the Vox piece, in order to determine whether there was cause to fire him. It was, everyone conceded, a fraught situation. Thrush is one of the Times’s most high-profile political reporters. His scandal erupted at a time when his deep West Wing reportage, often in collaboration with Maggie Haberman, was driving the national conversation on many days. And it occurred as his colleagues in the newsroom, particularly Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, were reporting stories that continued to fuel our national reckoning about sexual harassment.

Three weeks later, the Thrush investigation is winding down, and the Times is expected to deliver a verdict before Christmas. The probe has been a full-fledged inquest, consisting of numerous interviews with employees at the Times and Politico about Thrush’s behavior in the office and after hours. Its meticulous nature suggests the extent to which the Times fully comprehends the stakes. In addition to the primary consideration of sanitizing the workplace, multiple Times sources told me they also believed that the paper’s response to the Thrush controversy would almost certainly factor into its consideration for the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes, in which its series on Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly and others will surely be a strong contender.

The length of the investigation also underscores another element of the Thrush scandal. As a member of the Times’s Washington bureau told me last month, the behavior reported in the Vox piece, “lived in some gray areas.” Whereas the terminations of Matt Lauer,Charlie Rose, and Mark Halperin, among others, were swift and unequivocal, resulting from allegations that were generally perceived as more damning, the Thrush situation was “not an easy call,” as that same Times journalist put it to me. For the last several weeks, Charlotte Behrendt, an attorney who works in the Times newsroom as a senior manager for employee relations, has been essentially acting like a special counsel, interviewing dozens of employees to create a comprehensive account of Thrush’s behavior. (Sources at the Times acknowledged that she is somewhat akin to the Robert Mueller of Times probes.) As of now, no one is sure what the final verdict will be. Executive editor Dean Baquet recently acknowledged the complications of the Thrush affair when he was interviewed at Business Insider’s Ignition conference, telling the audience, “I don’t know where the line is, except for the obvious cases . . . It’s gonna be tricky to figure out where the lines are gonna be, and we’re gonna have to take it case by case.”

Within the Times itself, the Thrush scandal has created something of a schism. On one side, according to newsroom sources, there is a cohort of young, millennial, New York-based employees for whom the event has been particularly upsetting. These employees, these sources note, are generationally hyper-attuned to issues related to race, gender, and newsroom diversity, which they often discuss on the Times’s internal Slack app. For some within this cohort, there’s a sentiment that the Times should set an example amid our cultural awakening—that it would be hard to keep Thrush employed while continuing to lead the charge in covering the reckoning that has entangled him.

Things are different in the Washington bureau. While there are some who feel deeply uncomfortable with his conduct, the prevailing sentiment among Thrush’s colleagues in D.C. is that he should not lose his job over the contents of the Vox report, according to a half-dozen members of the bureau—men and women—with whom I spoke for this article, in addition to several other well-placed Times figures who are regularly in touch with the bureau. The Vox piece, the logic went, castigated Thrush for “bad judgment around young women journalists,” but did not make any allegations regarding sexual harassment, sexually motivated quid pro quo, sexual assault, or predation. (If any such charges were to come up in the Times probe, many suggested, he would obviously lose his goodwill.) For now, Thrush’s support extends all the way up to bureau chief Elisabeth Bumiller, according to people familiar with her thinking. (Reached by phone, Bumiller declined to comment.)

Privately, people in the bureau agree that Thrush embarrassed the Times and deserves public opprobrium; that he is a lousy husband; that his behavior was sleazy; that he should not have brought a 23-year-old Politico journalist to tears on a street corner late at night, as the Vox story reported, after she rebuffed him. They also generally agree that his offenses are not fireable. “The feelings of the bureau are pretty strong and influential, and they’re behind him, strongly,” said a person with knowledge of the atmosphere. A young female reporter in the bureau concurred. “Based on what we know from the Vox piece,” this person said, “people feel strongly about this based on the merits of the story. I’m not a huge Glenn fan. He’s not the most popular guy in the bureau. We’re not protecting him because he’s one of our own or because we love him. The Times has reported out a lot of stories like this, and by now, we know the difference between a Glenn and a Matt Lauer.” (I got a hold of Thrush on his cell phone earlier this week, but he declined to comment.) That said, even his strongest defenders acknowledge that if the Times allows Thrush to stay, it is difficult to imagine him returning to the White House beat.

Within the bureau, McGann’s article was viewed as problematic for other reasons, too. There has been much discussion about the fact that McGann met with Bumiller several months ago regarding a job in the bureau, a detail that everyone I spoke with felt should have been disclosed. (This concern was also flagged for Behrendt.) Another widely aired criticism is that the article should have either been a wholly first-person piece about McGann’s own experiences with Thrush, or an investigation that was conducted by a journalist other than McGann. On Twitter, ProPublica reporter Jesse Eisingerchided Vox for a “lapse in judgment to let a victim write a first-person account AND report on others. Can do one or the other, not both. Can’t be disinterested.”

After I reached out to McGann for comment, a spokeswoman e-mailed me a statement from Vox editor-in-chief Lauren Williams: “Laura’s piece was rigorously reported and fully vetted by Vox editors and attorneys. We stand by her reporting and writing, and we believe the relevant personal details were included in her story.” (Speaking of disclosures, I overlapped with McGann and Thrush when I worked at Politico, but I was based in New York and they were in Washington; I’ve had a few cordial interactions with Thrush over the past several years, but do not know him well, and I barely know McGann.)

Regardless of where you think Thrush’s sins fall on the spectrum of bad male behavior, which has come so sharply into focus over the past several months, and whether or not you think he deserves to lose his job, at least one thing is certain: the Times investigation has been exhaustive. Behrendt, whose job involves dealing with everything from contracts to newsroom re-orgs to sensitive personnel matters, is known for being tough and rigorous, leaving no stone unturned.

Behrendt, who declined to speak with me, has conducted a mix of in-person and phone-based interviews with more than 30 current and former colleagues of Thrush’s from the Times and Politico. Some of them she sought out, others came forward voluntarily. She recently spent two days in Washington meeting with members of the bureau, setting up camp in an unused office on the eighth floor of a building on Farragut Square. This perch, removed from the Washington bureau’s newsroom on the sixth and seventh floors, gave her interviewees a reasonable expectation of privacy if they did not want to be seen taking a meeting.

In a bright, glass-encased conference room, as well as in her phone interviews, Behrendt asked questions such as: Did Glenn ever make you feel uncomfortable? Did you ever witness any behavior of his that made you feel uncomfortable? Were you ever aware of him gossiping in the office about women? Did you see anything that would constitute sexual harassment? Anything that didn’t look consensual? And so on. The interviews generally lasted 30-45 minutes, and one source described them as “a really aggressive investigation,” in which a seemingly mundane response to one particular question could lead the conversation down a rabbit hole of another 10 or 20 follow-up questions. “She seems to be trying to delineate between brazen affairs and conduct that is either illegal or against the company code,” said a person with firsthand knowledge of the interviews.

Thrush is currently in treatment for alcohol abuse. As he awaits the ruling on his job, a lucrative Trump book that he and Haberman had agreed to do for Random House also remains in jeopardy. Meanwhile, his fate at the Times will presumably be the first major decision in the era of A.G. Sulzberger, who will take over as publisher on January 1 from his father, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. If no further allegations materialize and the Times keeps him, Thrush will be a rare casualty of the so-called #MeToo movement to avoid career annihilation, and in that regard, the Times’s decision could potentially set the tone for future cases that are similar in nature. Everyone will be watching.